Operating in a virtual environment utilizing a computer is a pass-time that is gaining popularity. A virtual environment is an interactive simulated environment accessible by multiple users who can interact through an “online” interface using a network client. One deficiency with VUs is that relatively few methods and mechanisms allow a user to have comprehensive control of an avatar's behavior, especially when they are not logged into the VU in real time. Furthermore, relatively few methods allow a user to customize commands and avatar activities from an asynchronous or remote method.
User friendliness of computers continues to be enhanced by better user interfaces. User interfaces for computers systems have evolved significantly since the personal computer (PC) first became widely available. One particular area of advancement in user interfaces technology pertains to a graphical user interface (‘GUI’) that can provide multiple menus and can accept user input on each menu.
With regard to VUs, users can inhabit and interact in the virtual environment via avatars, which can be two or three-dimensional graphical representations of human or non-human form. Alternately described, an avatar can be a graphical representation that a user selects for others to see while the avatar and others are in the same virtual space. An avatar can assume various graphical representations such as that of a human character, animal character, an icon, abstract personas, and so on.
Virtual environments have many different names. For example, a virtual environment can be referred to as a “metaverse,”, “3D Internet”, “virtual world”, and so on referred to herein collectively as a VU. Although there are many different types of virtual environments, there are several features many VUs have in common. For example, many VUs have a shared space, which is a “universe,” for many avatars to reside in as they concurrently participate in an activity. The VU avatars can traverse, inhabit, and interact with other avatars via 3-D graphics and landscapes. Thus, a VU can be populated by many thousands of residents or avatars. Often, the VU resembles aspects of the real world in terms of physics or physical laws, houses, and landscapes, etc.
An agent can be a user's account, upon which the user can build an avatar, and which is tied to the inventory of assets the user owns. A region can be a virtual area of land within the VU, typically residing on a single server. Assets, avatars, the environment, and anything visual can have UUIDs (unique universal identifier) that are associated with geometric data, among other data. The geometric data can be distributed to users as textual coordinates. Textures can be distributed to users as graphics files, which are placed within the boundaries of specified textual coordinates. Effects data can be rendered by the user's client according to the user's preferences and user's device capabilities. Lastly, socialization and/or community features allow and encourage the formation of social groups such as teams, guilds, clubs, cliques, housemates, neighborhoods, etc.
Residents can be personas or representations of the users of the VU, and residents can roam all about the virtual region by walking, driving, flying, or even by teleportation or transportation, which is essentially moving through space from one point to another in the VU, more, or less instantaneously. The VU can also include things that do not presently exist in real life. An avatar can have a wide range of business and social experiences while interacting with the VU. Such, business and social experiences are becoming more common and increasingly important in online VUs.
There are many different services that provide VUs via the World Wide Web. For example, Second Life, Entropies Universe, The Sims Online, There, and Red Light Center all provide some form of VU, and these service providers have trademark rights in such names. VUs can also provide multiplayer online games such as Ever Quest, Ultimo Online, Lineage, or World of Warcraft, and likewise such service providers have trademarks in such name. One popular VU mentioned above available is “Second Life” (Second Life is a trademark of Linden Research in the United States, other countries, or both). The Second Life client program provides its users (referred to as residents) with tools to view, navigate, and modify the Second Life world and participate in its virtual economy.
Second Life and other online VUs present a tremendous new outlet for both structured and unstructured virtual collaboration, gaming, exploration, advertising, and travel, as well as real-life simulations in virtual spaces. In addition many virtual environments provide immediacy, interactivity, and persistence. Immediacy allows interactions between a user's avatar and the environment to take place in real time. Persistence provides a continuous environment regardless of whether individual users are logged in.
Interactivity with the environment allows users to alter, develop, build, or submit customized content to a limited degree. As stated above, the types of objects that an avatar can possess and the types of actions an avatar can carry out are limited to the parameters of the virtual environment, which can vary for each VU service provider. The ability to customize an avatar's persona is less than perfect. For example, controlling the mood of an avatar or emotions of an avatar is not an intuitive process.
Some companies provide automated mood detectors that assume a mood of a user based on how a user interacts with their computer. Such automated mood detectors can provide emotions and animations such as crying, laughing, wagging a finger, and providing a peace sign with the avatars hands. Thus, the avatar can perform the action, do the movement when the participant, has a VU client mood acquisition system in an automated mode or a smart mode and the participant's computer can receive input from the participant's speech or text and can automatically apply a facial based on this indirect input. Such all indirect input is less than perfect.